House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has issued a subpoena to David Kramer, a former State Department official who, in late November 2016, traveled to London to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier from its author, former British spy Christopher Steele. Kramer then returned to the U.S. to give the document to Sen. John McCain.
Kramer is a senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University.
McCain later took a copy of the dossier to the FBI's then-director, James Comey. But the FBI already had the document; Steele himself gave the dossier to the bureau in installments, reportedly beginning in early July 2016.
McCain, recovering in Arizona from treatments for cancer, has long refused to detail his actions regarding the dossier. For his part, Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 19. The new subpoena stems from statements Kramer made in that interview.
In the session, Kramer told House investigators that he knew the identities of the Russian sources for the allegations in Steele's dossier. But when investigators pressed Kramer to reveal those names, he declined to do so.
Now, he is under subpoena. The subpoena, issued Wednesday afternoon, directs Kramer to appear again before House investigators on Jan. 11.
This is of course a troubling development because the House Intelligence Committee leaks like a sieve, the names once revealed might quickly make their way to the Kremlin and those Christopher Steele assets might simply disappear.
And wouldn't THAT be convenient for Donald Trump?
But why do this in the first place, since Mueller obviously knows who these individuals are and has likely already spoken to them?
Get this:
There is a growing belief among some congressional investigators that the Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some investigators' views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.
Investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: Is it likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?
So the argument is that since the Kremlin's trolls hacked government agencies and spread disinformation through various social platforms in America that ALL Russians should be considered liars and their information seen as suspect.
Of course the hole in that logic is that Streele was using assets that he had worked with for decades in some instances, and the information they had provided in the past had proven accurate.
It really seems pretty clear that this is yet another attempt by Nunes to sabotage the Russia investigations, and to cover for his boss, which is obviously Donald Trump, and NOT the constituents from California who elected him.
And by the way didn't Nunes supposedly recuse himself from this investigation?
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